THE LITTLE FARM

It was lonely up at the farm after his mother died. It was a little farm and he was the only son.

A track leading to the place went over flat fields between dry stone walls that in summer were yellow with stone-crop and lichen, and at the end stood the square grey house. He had lived there all his life, about thirty-five years, but he could not remember anyone ever painting it. Not that it mattered. Nobody ever came up there. A big walnut tree stood in the farmyard, by a stone barn, and a few damson trees along the banks of a pond. Every autumn most of the walnuts and damsons were blown off by wind and fell into the water, and the long uncut grass and the tall coffee-brown docks. It was seven or eight miles into market, and by the time you got the damsons gathered or the walnuts splashed and loaded them up into the back of the Morris, and by the time you counted petrol and time and the auctioneer’s fee and everything else, it was hardly worth the trouble. Besides this he could not read or write very well. He had always been able to read print a little, but not written word. He had to take figures, like many other things, on trust. All this was because he had never been to school very much. In winter the weather was often too bad for the three-mile journey; in summer there were crops to be hoed and harvested and his father needed him more. Then his father had died when he was seventeen, and after that it was a struggle to pay the rent, buy seed, and save enough to buy the ten-year-old car. All his time had been occupied with working. He was a big man now with square heavy shoulders and mild trustful grey eyes and a, way of biting his lips when he was thinking. His name was Tom Richards, and whenever he had occasion to write it he would still pause a moment before putting it down.

“You want to put it in the advertisement?” the girl said.

“Put what?”

“Put your name in. Or do you want a box-number?”

“Box number?”

“It’s instead of your name.”

“Ah?” He stood biting his lips, puzzled, watching her.

“If there are any replies, you see,” she said, “they come here. Then you can pick them up and nobody need know who you are, I think if I were you I’d have a box number.”

“All right, then, all right.”

She began to add up the words of the advertisement with her pencil point, and then paused. “Would you like to read it over again?”

“Sure I don’t know, I don’t know.” He put his large hands on the counter of the office, feeling them warm with sweat. “No,” he said, “you read it. You. You writ it, didn’t you?”

“All right.” The girl began to read what she had written for him because she thought he had been too embarrassed to write it himself.

“‘Lonely young farmer seeks young lady as companion housekeeper. 35. Own car. Strictest confidence. You think that’s all right?” she said.

“I want somebody as’ll work,” he said.

“Yes, I know” she said. “I know that. But I hardly know if I’d put that in.”

“No? All right, all right,” he said, “if you think it’ll do. How much’ll it be?”

She added up the words again, and then looked up. “Three and six. That’s just the one week.”

“When’ll I come in?”

“Try Saturday,” she said.

He went out of the newspaper office with relief and stood on the pavement outside, biting his lips. It was early summer. The sun struck hot on the pavement. Soon he would be needing someone for hay-time and harvest. He wanted a good, strong person, a good-looking person, but a hard-working person. That was his trouble. And as he stood there wondering what a hard-working person would look like and how he could tell, he remembered something.

He went back into the office. “I just thought of something,” he said. “A photograph. We never said that.”

“No,” the girl said. “We could put that.”

“You think it’s a good idea? It’s all right?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “We’ll put ‘photograph appreciated’. You’ll get it in for the same money.”

He had a three-acre piece of mangels on the south side of the house where the wind was broken by a ten-foot blackberry hedge. The blackberries were in flower, mauve and pink and white, and in the hot shelter of the hedge the mangels were growing fast. He began to hoe them that week, and as he moved up and down the rows, and still more as he stopped to give the hoe a touch with the file and stood looking back on the weeds that were already dying grey in the sun, he would think about the advertisement and what might come out of it. He thought of having someone who would do the housework and the cooking in the mornings, someone to come out ijito the fields round about milking-time or the early evening and help him. He thought of a woman who could hoe as well as a man or turn the hay-rows or help shock the wheat. His trouble, and his mother’s trouble, had always been how to get help up there and how to afford it. For some time now he had had a man named Jack Emmett coming up in the afternoons. Emmett had a milk-round down in Milton, the nearest town, and after he had finished the milk-round he drove out to the farm in a three-wheeler van and helped Tom Richards for four or five hours till dark. It didn’t really cost Tom anything in the way of ready money because Emmett bought the day’s milk supply of Tom’s four black Ayrshires and collected up a few eggs and then deducted the money for his own time, twenty-five shillings a week generally, out of the money he owed Tom for the milk and eggs. The trouble was to get Emmett to pay the rest. The Ayrshires didn’t give a great lot, but it varied and it mounted up, and there were always eggs, though Tom never knew how many. Emmett was always slow paying up, but what with people not paying him and the damn government putting restrictions on you for this and that, he would say, it was as much as he could do to keep going at all. When he finally paid up after four or five months, Tom was so glad to see the money or cake or seed that he was beyond arguing whether it was right or wrong. He took Emmett’s figures, like Emmett’s time and Emmett’s talk on trust. [...]

He felt nervous and warm as he drove down into the town on Saturday afternoon. Now, if there were replies, he felt that he would not know quite what to do.

In the front office of the newspaper the girl smiled and leaned back and stretched one hand back to the box-number pigeonholes. “Two,” she said. “There may be more yet.”

He stood with the envelopes in his hands, not speaking and not really looking at them.

“I hope they’re nice’ the girl said. “What you want.”

“Yeah.”

He still stood there, looking at her as if he had something on his mind.

“Eh,” he said. “Eh.”

“Yes?”

“You open ’em,” he said. “You read ’em for me.”

“Oh! no,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to.”

“Yeh,” he said. “Go on.” He gave the envelopes back to her. “You see, I ain’t all that much of a reader.”

He looked at her and waited. He liked her small, blonde, kind face. She had neat and friendly hands. He gazed at them steadily as she opened the first envelope.

“This one’s from a girl at Thorpe.”

“Yeh?”

“She says she’s twenty-nine. She’s been a general maid and she can cook and make butter, and she’s always wanted to be on a farm and she liked the country. She says, Tm lonely, too, and I’ll do anything I can if you think I’ll do to make things go properly. I don’t say I’m all that strong, but I’m willing and that’s everything so please write if favourable. Yours respectfully.’ Her name’s Annie Moore,” the girl said.

“Yeh, yeh.” He thought of something. “Ain’t they a photograph?” “No. No photograph.”

“Shall we look at the other?” she said. She began to open the envelope, and he could see that there was a photograph this time. The girl stood looking at it for a moment and then she held it slowly out to him. He, too, stood looking at it. The face in the photograph was rather broad and perhaps a little heavy about the eyes and lips, and her fair hair was brushed sideways and smooth across her ,forehead.

“She writes a sensible letter,” the girl said, but he was still looking at the photograph and he hardly listened as she went on. “She’s twenty-six and she says honestly she’s never been near a farm, but she’s always worked hard and she can learn. She says she’s living with friends and if you think it’s any good she’ll be free Sunday evening, and you can call to see her at this address, 12 Denmark Street, and you can take her out to the farm. She says any time between six and seven. Her name’s Edna. Edna Johnson.” He had heard only vaguely what had been said, and now he looked up. He felt that the photograph was living and that in a senses the decision had been made.

“She sounds better,” the girl said.

“Yeh. Lot better.”

“Sounds honest, that’s something.”

He was looking at the photograph again, at the broad, strong face and the smooth, strong hair. In a heavy kind of way it was a beautiful sort of face, but it was not so much about that he cared. It was the word “honest” that now rose above the rest of his impressions and took control of his mind. Honesty and strength — that was what he wanted. Somebody who would help and take a fair share of work and trouble, the good with the bad. Somebody he could trust.

In the evening sun the shadow of the walnut tree lay on the dull stone house, darkening the grey frames of the windows that had not been painted for years. It lay across the surface of the pond crusted by duckweed. It was heavy on rusted harrows lying deep in nettles by the bain, and on empty tarred pig-sties made long ago of barrel slats, and on junk littered and forgotten under the broken roofs of faggot hovels. It seemed to subdue everything except one thing: Edna Johnson’s light-yellow hair.

, You heard people say that a photograph could be faked to tell you anything, to make people look different from what they really were, but as he walked round the farm and across the fields where the blackberry flowers smothered all the hedges now and the wheat was rising heavy and dark in the sultry weather, Tom Richards would think again and again of how little faked the girl’s photograph was. Her face was strong and heavy and her arms were bare up to the shoulders. Her mouth, as in the photograph, was rather big, but when she smiled her teeth were clean and hard against the broad, soft lips. And above all, as in the photograph, there was the impression of honesty. He felt it now in the way she looked at him: above all, in the way she talked.

“Yeh.” She had an easy, straightforward way of talking, and sometimes he did not know what to say in answer. “You wan see the house?” he said at last, and she said yes, she would.

He knew there was nothing much he could say about the house and he hardly spoke as he showed her the smoke-darkened kitchen, with the dirty Valor oil-stove in one corner, where he did his own cooking and washing and most of his eating; the parlour, with the glaze-tiled grate and wallpaper so old and sun-faded that the pattern was now as faint as a watermark; the three bedrooms with the big high brass bedsteads, the white toilet services set out nakedly on marble washstands, the family photographs on the walls, the old-fashioned tasseled valences on the beds, and the long ivory-coloured curtains of lace at the paintless windows. In one of the bedrooms he saw her pause and look out of the window across fields, that stretched for a mile or so without another house. The room smelled old and airless after the heat of the day. Suddenly she went to the window and tried to open it; but years before, perhaps when it had last been painted, the woodwork had stuck and he could not remember it ever having been opened. After struggling for a moment she seemed to realise the hopelessness of it too, and gave it up and stood away and said: “Let’s go downstairs.”

As they went downstairs he thought it best that they should sit in the parlour. It was never used, but it seemed right. That, too, smelled airless and dead, the air stale with sun-warmed dust. On the mantelpiece stood a pair of pink glass vases filled with stalks of brown bullrushes that many years before had been gathered by his mother from the pond. If you touched them they crumbled into fine brown dust. Behind the vases hung a mirror that twisted the reflection of the faces that looked into it, and immediately in front of it stood a white marble clock that did not go. It had always seemed to him a nice clean little parlour and at Christmastime, when he brought in logs for the fire, it was warm and pleasant. But now he was not happy. He began to realise at last that the honesty of the girl, if it were really the kind of honesty he hoped and thought it was, must make her at last get up and go out of the dead, airless, dusty little parlour and not come back again.

From the moment when, down in the town, he had seen her come out of the house, hatless, her fair hair brushed smooth and her three-quarter-length navy coat unbuttoned so that her cream frock showed tight over her rather big body, he had been nervous. Now, as she sat on the chair near the window and watched the evening light streaming across the room, making her blonde skin seem fairer than ever and her light hair even lighter in tone, he felt sick because of the sense of growing failure. Perhaps he could have told Emmett. Together they might have cleaned the place up a bit. He thought suddenly of his mother, slipshod, rooted in old careless ways, and he felt that the place belonged to and smelled of the dead.

“Well, I don’t know what you think,” he said, “I know it ain’t oversmart. But I’m so short-handed.”

She did not speak.

“It ain’t a very big farm/ he said. “Perhaps it ain’t so big as you thought it’d be.”

She was not looking at him, but she seemed to be listening, as though perhaps she was impressed not so much by what he was saying as by the simple, anxious tone of his voice.

“Well,” she said at last, and then she stopped.

He felt he knew what she was going to say, and before she could speak again he began to talk quite quickly. He said, “I got a little money. I don’t want you to think I ain’t. Mum left sixty-odd pound and there’s some of it still in sovereigns and some more in old War Savings Certificates. Then I got thirty or forty in the bank. I ain’t touched that for a good while. Then Emmett owes me seventy-odd. I don’t want you to think I ain’t got nothingj see? I can pay. I’ll pay twenty-five shillings.”

“Who’s Emmett?”

“He takes my milk.”

“He owes all that? Seventy-odd for milk?”

“Yeh. Alius owes like that.”

“Always,” she said. “You let him?”

“Yeh,” he said. “You see I ain’t very much good at figures.”

She did not speak. She sat with her face resting on one hand, looking at the pattern of the cheap grey lino on the floor. The skin of her hands and face and neck was creamy and warm and she had fine golden hairs on the backs of her rather broad hands. He knew now that whether she came or not something must happen. He felt tightened up inside himself, tense and yet unsteady because he liked her.

“You see, I can’t do it all myself,” he said, “Cooking and washing-up and cleaning. I can’t do it. That’s why the place looks so bad. It wants a thorough doin’. It ain’t had one since Mum died.”

“Not any sister?” she said.

“No.”

“Any aunts or anybody?”

“No. Well, I got an aunt and a cousin over at Stanstead. But they never come near.”

“Nobody at all?”

“Nobody,” he said.

She seemed to think it over a little longer, still with her face in her hands and her eyes on the floor.

“Things’d have to be changed,” she said at last, “if I came.”

“I know,” he said. “I know they’d have to be changed. Changed a lot. I know.”

“All right.” She got up at last and ran her hands down the front of her body, smoothing her dress. “All right,” she said. “As long as you know.”